The word ‘marriage’ has vanished
from UK Government conception figures.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS),
which released the information, said for birth and conception statistics it
“does not distinguish between civil partnerships and marriages”. Instead the term ‘legal partnership’
is used for both.

New figures show that, in 2009, there were
around 900,000 conceptions in England and Wales and only 218 of those were
attributed to someone in a civil partnership.

The move is likely to concern those who believe marriage needs to be
distinguished other types of relationship for the purposes of analysis and
policy-making.

However, last month Iain Duncan
Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said his department would
reintroduce references to marriage on official forms and pieces of research.

Currently, census data in the UK does not
distinguish between marriage and cohabitation even though cohabitation is very
different from marriage. One important difference is that cohabiting
relationships tend to be much more short-lived than marriages.